Integrated Multilevel Production Planning Solution According to Industry 5.0 Principles

This paper presents the development and implementation of Integrated Multilevel Planning Solution (IMPS) a solution adhering to Industry 4.0 and 5.0 standards. Today, companies face challenges in understanding how new orders would impact existing production plans when there is limited traceability and information flow in their manufacturing process. The digital transformation of the production planning system enables a company to overcome the current challenges; however, to overcome the usual barriers of digital transformation a specialized solution for each company should be developed. IMPS was developed by first understanding the problems in the existing production planning process through a gemba (jap. for “actual place”) walk and interviews with stakeholders. The solution was designed with a human-centric approach and consists of seven components (Design System App (DSA), SAP (Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing), Microsoft Project, Microsoft Project Server, The Project Group (TPG) PSLink software, TPG ProjectLink, Tableau, and Smart Digital Assistance), which are well connected and integrated into the existing design. The system is accessible to the end user to find information, as the principles of Industry 5.0 require. A multivariant and multiuser planning capability was achieved with an interconnected Gantt chart of the master project with the ability to drill down into individual projects and custom views for various types of internal users. Most of the production planning solutions found in the literature were optimization-oriented, related to the improvements of the calculation methods within the planning activities in order to achieve a better efficiency of the planning system. Here, the goal was to achieve a system architecture that enabled a unique solution for design-to-order manufacturing without complex interventions into the existing system, which overcomes the most common barriers in Industry 4.0 implementations which are the human resistance to change, high investments, a lack of needed skills and knowledge for its implementation and use, and challenges of the adaptability to the new system. IMPS (ver 1.0) is a hybrid solution for SMEs, which aims to advance their planning system from the most commonly used Excel sheets towards a more advanced system but has financial and knowledge limitations from its implementation of highly complex software (ver. 1.0).